Time Travel

Straub's new novel is a time-travel fantasy about a 40-year-old woman who's tending to her ailing father — until, that is, the day she's transported to her childhood home on her 16th birthday.

Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, best known for his graphic novel Ghost World, has a new book, Patience, a love story that was five years in the making. In it, Clowes uses time travel to explore themes like tragedy and regret.

Rian Johnson's action-thriller can't dodge the frustrating elements of most time-travel tales, but the film's characters, performances and stylization add up to an experience that critic David Edelstein believes is the right amount of happy and tragic.

The director's latest comedy stars Owen Wilson as a time-traveling writer who winds up in Paris, in the 1920s, alongside Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Stein. Critic David Edelstein says Wilson's acting is superb -- and the film recalls Woody Allen's earliest days in film.

Last night, ABC presented the two-hour season premiere of Lost, the mystery-shrouded ABC drama that's beginning its final year. The network was so secretive about the show's contents that it made only the first five minutes available for critics to preview. TV critic David Bianculli reviews the premiere and takes a larger look at the Lost phenomenon.

The actor appears in the new comedy Funny People as well as the drama The Time Traveler's Wife, due out soon. He got his start doing standup and sketch comedy in Australia.

A new novel three decades in the making features time travel, screwball hidden identity plots and lively background music. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan calls The Little Book by Selden Edwards an "an ideal late-summer reading getaway."

Film critic David Edelstein comments on the DVD release of Donnie Darko, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the novel "A Scientific Romance" (Picador) by Ronald Wright